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Category: War

Britain funds research into autonomous drones that select who they kill, says report

Britain funds research into autonomous drones that select who they kill, says report

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The Guardian reports: Technologies that could unleash a generation of lethal weapons systems requiring little or no human interaction are being funded by the Ministry of Defence, according to a new report. The development of autonomous military systems – dubbed “killer robots” by campaigners opposed to them – is deeply contentious. Earlier this year, Google withdrew from the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which uses machine learning to analyse video feeds from drones, after ethical objections from the tech giant’s staff. The…

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Trump administration to end refueling for Saudi coalition aircraft in Yemen

Trump administration to end refueling for Saudi coalition aircraft in Yemen

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The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration is ending the practice of refueling Saudi coalition aircraft, halting the most tangible and controversial aspect of U.S. support for the kingdom’s three-year war in Yemen, people familiar with the situation said. The move comes amid escalating criticism of Saudi Arabia’s conduct in the war. Lawmakers from both parties have demanded that the United States suspend weapons sales to Riyadh and cut off aerial refueling of aircraft flown by the Saudi coalition, which…

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How the war in Yemen became a bloody stalemate — and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis

How the war in Yemen became a bloody stalemate — and the world’s worst humanitarian crisis

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Robert F Worth reports: In March 2015, Saudi Arabia unleashed a full-scale military campaign against the Houthis, who had captured most of Yemen a few months earlier. The Saudis had assembled a coalition of nine states, and they made clear that they considered the Houthis, who are allied with Iran, a mortal threat on their southern border. The war has turned much of Yemen into a wasteland and has killed at least 10,000 civilians, mostly in errant airstrikes. The real…

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Is Russia preparing to engage in some kind of hybrid warfare in Finland?

Is Russia preparing to engage in some kind of hybrid warfare in Finland?

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The New York Times reports: Retired to a tiny island in an archipelago between Finland and Sweden, Leo Gastgivar awoke early one morning to visit the outhouse in his bathrobe, only to notice two black speedboats packed with Finnish commandos in camouflage fatigues waiting in the bay near his front door. After an exchange of awkward greetings, Mr. Gastgivar went inside, collected a pair of binoculars and watched aghast as the commandos raced off toward the island of his nearest…

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There’s no path to victory in Afghanistan — there never was

There’s no path to victory in Afghanistan — there never was

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Fred Kaplan writes: This month, for the first time, the U.S. armed forces are recruiting young men and women who weren’t yet born when the invasion of Afghanistan took place. The war has been going on for 17 years now (17-year-olds can enlist with parental consent), making it the longest war in American history. Yet we are no closer than we have ever been to accomplishing our objectives, in part because those objectives have been so sketchily, inconsistently, and unrealistically…

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This is the front line of Saudi Arabia’s invisible war

This is the front line of Saudi Arabia’s invisible war

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Declan Walsh reports: The Saudi-led war in Yemen has ground on for more than three years, killing thousands of civilians and creating what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. But it took the crisis over the apparent murder of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate two weeks ago for the world to take notice. Saudi Arabia’s brash young crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, under scrutiny over the Khashoggi case, now faces a fresh reckoning for…

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Former U.S. special operations fighters hired to assassinate politicians in the Middle East

Former U.S. special operations fighters hired to assassinate politicians in the Middle East

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BuzzFeed reports: Cradling an AK-47 and sucking a lollipop, the former American Green Beret bumped along in the back of an armored SUV as it wound through the darkened streets of Aden. Two other commandos on the mission were former Navy SEALs. As elite US special operations fighters, they had years of specialized training by the US military to protect America. But now they were working for a different master: a private US company that had been hired by the…

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Yemen on brink of ‘world’s worst famine in 100 years’ if war continues

Yemen on brink of ‘world’s worst famine in 100 years’ if war continues

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The Guardian reports: Yemen could be facing the worst famine in 100 years if airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition are not halted, the UN has warned. If war continues, famine could engulf the country in the next three months, with 12 to 13 million civilians at risk of starvation, according to Lise Grande, the agency’s humanitarian coordinator for Yemen. She told the BBC: “I think many of us felt as we went into the 21st century that it was unthinkable…

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Are there communities that are good at being good when things get bad?

Are there communities that are good at being good when things get bad?

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Margaret Paxson writes: Let’s just say that suddenly you are a social scientist and you want to study peace. That is, you want to understand what makes for a peaceful society. Let’s say that, for years in your work in various parts of the world, you’ve been surrounded by evidence of violence and war. From individual people, you’ve heard about beatings and arrests and murders and rapes; you’ve heard about deportations and black-masked men demanding your food or your life….

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The U.S. has helped nurture a new generation of Mideast dictators

The U.S. has helped nurture a new generation of Mideast dictators

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Evan Hill writes: On Oct. 2, prominent Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi walked into his country’s consulate in Istanbul and never walked out again. The government adviser turned critic, who entered self-exile last year and lived outside D.C., was there to finalize paperwork for his upcoming marriage to his Turkish fiancée. Once inside, according to Turkish authorities, a Saudi team lying in wait killed him and took his body away. Khashoggi’s disappearance and possible killing is a fork in the road…

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Social media is revolutionizing warfare

Social media is revolutionizing warfare

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P. W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking write: “The exponential explosion of publicly available information is changing the global intelligence system … It’s changing how we tool, how we organize, how we institutionalize—everything we do.” This is what a former high-level intelligence official told us back in the summer of 2016, explaining how the people who collect secrets—professional spies—were adjusting to a world increasingly without secrets. We were asking him about one of the most important changes in technology and…

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Russia accused of cyber-attack on chemical weapons watchdog

Russia accused of cyber-attack on chemical weapons watchdog

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The Guardian reports: A Russian cyber-attack on the headquarters of the international chemical weapons watchdog was disrupted by Dutch military intelligence just weeks after the Salisbury novichok attack, it emerged on Thursday, amid fresh revelations of spying that escalated the diplomatic war between the west and Vladimir Putin. The incident, which was thwarted with the help of British intelligence officials, came after the Sandworm cybercrime unit of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU had attempted unsuccessfully to hack the UK…

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How the UN has saved Lebanon

How the UN has saved Lebanon

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Max Boot writes: Imagine 125 million refugees flooding into the United States (population: 328 million). That is what Lebanon has experienced on a per capita basis. Since 2011, this nation of 4 million people has seen an influx of some 1.5 million refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war next door. “I find it a miracle this country hasn’t exploded,” a Western diplomat told me last week. “Most countries would never have allowed this to happen.” This is the dog that…

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As midterms approach, proposed U.S. Navy show of force would escalate tensions with China

As midterms approach, proposed U.S. Navy show of force would escalate tensions with China

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CNN reports: The US Navy’s Pacific Fleet has drawn up a classified proposal to carry out a global show of force as a warning to China and to demonstrate the US is prepared to deter and counter their military actions, according to several US defense officials. The draft proposal from the Navy is recommending the US Pacific Fleet conduct a series of operations during a single week in November. The goal is to carry out a highly focused and concentrated…

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Armageddon postponed: Syria’s Idlib province gets new lease on life

Armageddon postponed: Syria’s Idlib province gets new lease on life

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Christoph Reuter reports: Two weeks before the sudden cease-fire, Abdul Aziz Ajini’s neighbors thought he had gone crazy. While others in the village of Kurin, located in Idlib province, trembled with fear ahead of the major offensive on the immediate horizon, Ajini, a former professor of English literature at a local college, began to rebuild his home, which had been bombed to rubble years ago. As the people of Idlib were trying to sell their homes, property and furniture to…

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Yemen’s three wars

Yemen’s three wars

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Gregory D. Johnsen writes: Last month, over the course of a few days in Yemen, one governor survived a roadside bomb while a second was denied entry through a checkpoint ostensibly run by his own government. At a military college in Aden, the government’s temporary capital, pro-secessionist soldiers opened fire on a graduation ceremony in response to the raising of the national flag. Three small security events—barely blips in Yemen’s daily catalogue of strikes that have already disappeared from the…

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